Pride and Prejudice and Dungeons & Dragons collide in a new actual play

Dimension 20’s next Dungeons & Dragons actual play campaign offers up something even more dangerous than the Demogorgon — Regency-era romance. A Court of Fey & Flowers Dropout TV will air a series of 10 tabletop role playing episodes that starts Aug. 3. This announcement was made Wednesday along with a trailer. Polygon sat down with game master Aabria Iyengar to find out what’s in store.

Iyengar works well with Dimension 20’s team. She made her debut with the troupe in 2020. Pirates of LeviathanMarishaRay, Matt Mercer and B. Dave Walters shared a meal at a restaurant called. From there Iyengar’s career as a GM has taken off, leading to additional opportunities with Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, among others. Now she’s back and headlining Dimension 20’s next actual play campaign. Her goal? To take “a big swing” at moving the medium forward.

Photo by Dimension 20

“There’s just something about Dimension 20 specifically that scratches every beautiful part of the comedy and improvisation and that wildly creative storytelling thing,” Iyengar told Polygon. “It opened up the new possibility for the kind of stories you could tell versus the sort of epic-tier, high fantasy D&D games that I kind of [grew up with].”

The plan is to mash up traditional D&D with Good SocietyStorybrewers has created a tabletop RPG called ‘Escape Planes’ for indie gamers. Polygon recently called a Round-up. Good Society “the gold standard in Regency role-play.” It’s a system that Iyengar simply adores.

“There’s something about the mechanics and how elegantly they’re written into Good Society that allows you to drop into the pacing of that kind of storytelling,” Iyengar said. “It shows you the specific ways in which your character expresses themselves. There’s a rumor phase and a letter-writing phase, and reputation markers and a reputation economy. [I]It was so easy to incorporate [that] into the story.”

All of the characters at the table will be fairy folk — known as Fey in the vernacular. Iyengar says they’re “the closest thing we have to the idle rich” in D&D. The Bloom is a magical event that floods the Feywild with magic energy and fills its surrounding realms, which has brought together characters. But a new and mysterious threat emerges, and it will be up to the characters to sort things out — plus they’ll be navigating their budding relationships. It features veteran Dimension 20 players. Brennan Lee MulliganLou Wilson Emily AxfordAlongside newcomers Surena Marie, Oscar MontoyaAnd Omar Najam.

Photo by Dimension 20

The actual play programming can be very long so fans may need to invest a lot time to stay current. The first show should be the most important. Iyengar believes the first episode will be a great way to anticipate the nine subsequent episodes.

“I’m a huge fan of giving each of the characters their own sort of introduction on their own turf,” Iyengar said. “I think there’s something very important with how a couple of our characters are introduced that tells you everything you need to know about them and the world that they function so effectively within. […] Pay attention to the stage the characters are setting, because they’ll tell you exactly who they are when they’re alone. Then it becomes so interesting to watch who they become and who they change and the molds that they step into or out of when they hit Fey society writ large.”